mikes

So I did a couple rounds of recording a few days ago and would like to talk about mikes. Both my sound engineer and I had a very educational experience learning about miking the violin. He was a student as well. Usually when I recorded in the past at my previous school, there was a specialist in classical music and we were always able to rent out a hall, but this time a studio was utilized. The first studio was very small and we used 2 different mikes usually used for singing. We found that this di not sound very good. So after a few takes, we used only one of the mikes that we found made the sound quality better for violin. My engineer said that it was not so good for voice, thats why it was the backup mike, but we discovered it was great for violin. We also increased the distance between me and the mikes, and this had a tremendous effect on the sound. The next day we used a larger studio and 2 of the same mikes that we discovered were good violin. We also placed them even farther away, and this seemed to be a winning combination. Now we both know how to successfully record violin, so the next time I do sessions for somebody not really familiar with my instrument, I can lead them in the right direction. This is something I think would be beneficial to every instrumentalist, learning the best way to record yourself professionally, because we can never assume that the sound engineers are necessarily experts at our instruments!